How Wolfenstein: The Old Blood Continues to Shun Modern Shooter Trends

Wolfenstein 3D may be the granddaddy of the first-person shooter as we recognise it today but the relevance of Wolfenstein’s once-venerable name has faded over the decades. Today huge numbers of gamers flock to the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield; these are the modern era’s shooters du jour. To many, Wolfenstein is a curiosity from another age.

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The New Order shunned the kind of trends that have come to define the past five-or-so years of shooters and it was all the better for it

Nonetheless, 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order arrived as an extremely timely antidote to today’s increasingly homogenised shooter set. Rather than a multiplayer-focussed experience with a brief, token single-player mode tacked on, The New Order looked to the likes of rich and lengthy solo shooters like Starbreeze’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness for inspiration. It’s little wonder considering MachineGames, the team behind The New Order, was founded by several key former members of Starbreeze.

While I struggle to distinguish between Call of Duty’s consecutive versions of the future, The New Order’s unique, retrofuturistic vision of a world where the Nazis won World War II takes far more cues from the domain of BioShock than it does modern military shooters.

And while a good many of today’s high profile FPS games work hard to maintain their stern realism and permanently po-faced persona, The New Order says to hell with being sensible and takes us to the Nazis’ top-secret, high security moon base.

My point is The New Order shunned the kind of trends that have come to define the past five-or-so years of shooters and it was all the better for it.

The Old Blood, developed by MachineGames, is a standalone game so you won’t need to own The New Order to play it. Rather than picking up following the nebulous ending of The New Order, The Old Blood is a prequel – and the developers explain that The Old Blood ultimately concludes a few hours before the events of The New Order begin. It also promises to fill in some of the fiction glossed over somewhat in The New Order and give us a glimpse of the Nazi war machine as it begins to develop some the early versions of the devastating super-weapons leading man BJ Blazkowicz faced in MachineGames’ perverse concept of a Nazi-dominated 1960s.

Like these guys.

The Old Blood will consist of eight chapters which will span two interconnected stories. That’s half the size of The New Order (with its 16 chapters) but that difference is also reflected in The Old Blood’s lesser price point (USD$19.99/£14.99/€19.99/AUD$39.95/NZD$39.95). It’s also worth noting that even a game half the length of The New Order should still be longer than many of today’s worryingly lean first-person shooters.

I recently played through an hour of The Old Blood and thoroughly enjoyed what I saw. The segments I tackled were plucked from three separate levels from the game’s first story – “Rudi Jäger and the Den of Wolves” – which begins as BJ Blazkowicz and his partner Agent One prepare to infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein itself. Blazkowicz’s mission is to secure the coordinates of General Deathshead’s secret compound (the assault upon which forms the first chapter of The New Order). Long-time fans will spot some parallels between The Old Blood and the 2001 fan favourite Return to Castle Wolfenstein, as well as a few familiar faces.

You can certainly see every one of the 14 years that separates the two games, however.

The incredible level of world detail MachineGames established in The New Order continues in The Old Blood, and the team remains committed to its pulp vision of an over-the-top Nazi nightmare. Illustrated propaganda posters line walls and elevators. German guards, engaged in conversations amongst themselves, scramble to salute a disguised Blazkowicz as he walks past clad in an officer’s uniform. Rudi Jäger himself is an absurdly large slab of man who looks like what you’d get if you super-accelerated several Dolph Lundgrens into each other in the Large Hadron Collider.

The Old Blood’s Castle Wolfenstein is quite glorious, perched on the edge of a mountain and accessible only by cable car it positively smacks of the Schloss Adler from the 1968 Richard Burton/Clint Eastwood action-adventure classic Where Eagles Dare and that’s more than fine by me. It’s refreshingly different to anything in The New Order; it’s reminiscent in parts of the castle sections of General Deathshead’s compound in The New Order but it’s very much a fresh place.

No, you keep it.

Fresh too are several of the weapons on offer. First and foremost, Blazkowicz now carries a length of pipe which can be split into two pieces. The pipe is used as both a melee weapon and to navigate the environment (for instance, as a climbing tool or to jimmy open trap doors). Its functionality as the latter doesn’t really seem to have much of a net effect on proceedings but its role as a melee weapon is well executed. Players who prefer to approach encounters stealthily rather than guns akimbo will be rewarded with a host of sickening new stealth kills as Blazkowicz shanks, spears, and bludgeons his way through the Nazi menace. The pipes are hollow too, so jamming one into the delicate neckmeat of one of The Old Blood’s B-movie Nazi goons results in a spurt of claret gushing out the other end.

There’s also a new and powerful bolt-action rifle (dubbed the Bombenschuss) which deals hefty damage but requires an accurate hand, as well as the aptly named “Shockhammer” (a rapid firing shotgun) and a grenade launching pistol (the Kampfpistole).

Fetch!

My stint with The Old Blood is short but it certainly feels as equally confident and polished as The New Order for now. Single-player shooter fans would do well to keep one eye on this, regardless of whether they’ve played The New Order or not. I’ve only played a fraction of The Old Blood but I’ll definitely be enlisting for more next week.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood will be available digitally on PC, PS4, and Xbox One on May 5 across the globe. A physical release is scheduled for May 14 in Australia and NZ and May 15 in Europe; no physical release is planned for the US.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU and on most days of the week Where Eagles Dare is his favourite damn movie ever. You can find him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly, or chat with him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.